Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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more effectively on inducing, supporting and sustaining improvements in
development policy and governance. This is the challenge of today’s policy
dialogue.
Approach adopted in this paper
This paper argues that imperfections in the policy dialogue between donors
and governments in sub-Saharan Africa have contributed to the disappointing
developmental performance of that continent. It will illustrate this by
pointing at key issues that came up in the interaction between donors and
the recipient governments, particularly in Zambia. Other experiences are
also used for proposing improvements to the policy dialogue.
The evolving and widening coverage of the policy dialogue
An important objective of the policy dialogue that donors conduct with a
recipient government is to ensure, first, that it fully understands the policy
intentions of the government that asks them to support its programme, so
that eventually donors can propose and implement the most suitable aid
intervention; and, second, that in the recipient country a maximally supportive
policy environment is in place (and stays in place) to ensure positive
development results and the effective utilisation of donor aid. To achieve
that objective, donors engage in a policy dialogue in several ways and in
several forums.
Over the years the policy dialogue has covered an increasingly wide spectrum
of issues, reflecting the evolving understanding of what brings about
development. Development, growth and poverty reduction are no longer
seen to come only from capital accumulation (which is what foreign aid was
originally set up to facilitate), but increasingly from ‘good development
policy and good governance’. Donors now feel that much development
progress can be achieved in developing countries if the governments of
these countries would only reform their policies. In the light of the foregoing,
they also believe that they need to, and are able to provide, something
more than money. They believe that an important component of aid is the
transfer of ‘knowledge’, including the transfer of technical and institutional
knowledge of ‘what worked elsewhere’, in particular of ‘what policies worked
elsewhere’.
In the policy dialogue of the 1990s, donors even went beyond a discussion
of the appropriateness of recipient government policies in relation to
the achievement of development objectives, and began to embark on a discussion
on the objectives of these development policies, including the balance
between economic growth and poverty reduction. Several donors did
this because they felt that such a discussion was needed to maintain or
strengthen the mandate of aid in their own countries, which required them